So, I’m currently working for eKiwi, which does web data extraction for clients, and also sells software called “screen-scraper” to allow you to extract data from the web yourself.
I recently redesigned their logo, since the old logo was done by an old employee (old as in no longer present, not as in age 🙂 ) and we no longer had the project files. The only version that we had wasn’t very big, so pixelation was pretty ugly.

new splash logo

Old logo

Click for larger version. Both images are copyrighted to EKIWI LLC, 2008

So, there it is. My job wasn’t so much to redesign, I guess, as it was to recreate it. In Adobe Photoshop, I inserted the old graphic (which was really small, dimensionally speaking) and resized it so that it was huge. I then used the Path tool to trace the edges of the shape, to ultimately create a mask, one for the left swirl thing and one for the right swirl thing.

From there it was really just a matter of adding the effects. The CS editions of Photoshop allow you to use “Flash” effects. (Adobe bought Macromedia a while back, so Adobe aquired the Flash program.) The effects are completely dynamic and are updated realtime as you change parts of your current layer. Thus, once I had my swirls masked to reveal only the swirl shape, the layer effects were only a matter of fine tweaking, to find the look that best emulated the old logo, yet still gave it a “brand new” shine.

The goodness of layer masks in Photoshop is that you can do it with Vectors, which means that the program is creating a calculated shape, not just pixels. This lets you resize the shape on the fly, bigger or smaller, without losing any quality at all.

In my opinion, that’s the power behind an image editing program. Adobe’s Illustrator program deals with vector images, so it potential to be the best tool out there for such things, but my pockets are only so deep. 🙂

In other brief news, we (eKiwi) got our new http://community.screen-scraper.com site up and running. It’s based on a free (yet complex) site template called Drupal. It’s skinnable, and takes plugins (or “modules”), and is PHP based. You download the whole thing to your own web server, and thus can edit the site however you wish. I’ve been helping out with the CSS and PHP, though it’s not really my project.